Goodman gets OK for new industrial buildings near Long Beach Airport 

After winning a key Planning Commission signoff, the Australian industrial giant Goodman will move ahead with plans for a major upgrade to its high-profile 93-acre aerospace-focused complex near the Long Beach Airport.

Last fall Goodman filed a proposal to build two new industrial buildings, totaling nearly 600,000 square feet, on a 28-acre portion of the former Boeing site. The Long Beach Planning Commission signed off on the project’s masterplan at a meeting last month. 

Under the plan, the company will demolish one former plane manufacturing building and focus first on the larger of the two new buildings, a 505,000-square-foot complex that could accommodate up to three tenants, Jim Cottrell, a Goodman development executive, said at the commission meeting. 

“It’s designed to accommodate both manufacturing and warehousing,” Cottrell added. “There’s really nothing quite like it on the market.” 

Goodman could deliver that building, which will be LEED certified and include EV chargers, by the end of 2024, Cottrell said. The building will also be “solar ready,” with solar panels added to its roof depending on the preference of potential tenants. The smaller of the two buildings will have around 80,000 square feet. 

Goodman, a firm that has industrial holdings all over the world, bought the massive site, which was used by Boeing for decades to manufacture Globemaster C-17 military planes, for more than $200 million in 2019, and then signed on the rocket manufacturer Relativity Space as a long-term tenant in 2021.  

In addition to the two Long Beach buildings, the firm also plans to build two more buildings on the same property that fall under the jurisdiction of neighboring Lakewood, which must be approved separately. 

Before receiving the master plan sign off from Long Beach, Goodman agreed to implement certain street infrastructure improvements, including protected bike lanes and new median landscaping. The Planning Commission cited potential traffic concerns from the new project but ultimately approved it.

The firm could begin demolishing the former Boeing building within weeks, Cottrell said at the meeting, although the commission will also have to sign off on the individual building plans before construction.  

In 2021, Goodman also began construction on a massive logistics center in Fullerton, about 15 miles east of its Long Beach complex. 

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